The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Unasur opens Defense School to elaborate a shared doctrine of peace and stability
The Union of South American Nations, Unasur will celebrate this Friday its eighth anniversary with the official opening of the South American Defense School (Esude) created to instruct on defense and security issues, both at civil and military level, following ‘the principles of a regional strategic vision'.
Continue reading “Mongoose: UNASUR Opens Defense School Focused on Peace and Stability”
Security flaw gave researcher the power to erase every video on YouTube
Today's tale of apocalyptic internet near-misses comes from software developer Kamil Hismatullin, who discovered a security flaw in YouTube that allowed him to delete any video he wanted—or all of them, if he so desired. Fortunately, he did not so desire (although he apparently had some thoughts about doing a number on Justin Bieber's channel), and instead he reported the bug to Google and collected a $5000 reward.
Continue reading “Mongoose: Security flaw gave researcher the power to erase every video on YouTube”
Are we just going to sit here while the unintended consequences of bad design wreak havoc on our lives? A retrospective about RFID creep and GPS abuse is called for.
EXTRACT
#Westgate Tweets: A Detailed Study in Information Forensics
My team and I at QCRI have just completed a detailed analysis of the 13,200+ tweets posted from one hour before the attacks began until two hours into the attack. The purpose of this study, which will be launched at CrisisMappers 2013 in Nairobi tomorrow, is to make sense of the Big (Crisis) Data generated during the first hours of the siege. A summary of our results are displayed below. The full results of our analysis and discussion of findings are available as a GoogleDoc and also PDF. The purpose of this public GoogleDoc is to solicit comments on our methodology so as to inform the next phase of our research. Indeed, our aim is to categorize and study the entire Westgate dataset in the coming months (730,000+ tweets). In the meantime, sincere appreciation go to my outstanding QCRI Research Assistants, Ms. Brittany Card and Ms. Justine MacKinnon for their hard work on the coding and analysis of the 13,200+ tweets. Our study builds on this preliminary review.
The following 7 figures summarize the main findings of our study. These are discussed in more detail in the GoogleDoc/PDF.
Figure 1: Who Authored the Most Tweets?
Figure 2: Frequency of Tweets by Eyewitnesses Over Time?
Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
If an Android device (phone or tablet) has ever logged on to a particular Wi-Fi network, then Google probably knows the Wi-Fi password. Considering how many Android devices there are, it is likely that Google can access most Wi-Fi passwords worldwide.
Recently IDC reported that 187 million Android phones were shipped in the second quarter of this year. That multiplies out to 748 million phones in 2013, a figure that does not include Android tablets.
Many (probably most) of these Android phones and tablets are phoning home to Google, backing up Wi-Fi passwords along with other assorted settings. And, although they have never said so directly, it is obvious that Google can read the passwords.
Full article with many links below the line.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Google Evil – Exploits All Wi-Fi Passwords”
September 8, 2013
IBM is a respected technology company and it appears that hardly anything can bad can be said about them. There comes a time when every company must admit they have a fault in their product and IBM must step up to the plate this time. The news comes to us from Secunia, a Web site that monitors technology security, in the warning, “Security Advisory SA54460-IBM Content Analytics With Enterprise Search Multiple Vulnerabilities.”The warning is labeled as moderately critical and should worry organizations that use the software to manage their data. The bug messes with cross site scripting, manipulates data, exposes sensitive information, and a DoS.
Here is the official description:
“IBM has acknowledged a weakness and multiple vulnerabilities in IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search, which can be exploited by malicious people to disclose certain sensitive information, conduct cross-site scripting attacks, manipulate certain data, and cause a DoS (Denial of Service).”
Ouch! IBM must not be happy about this, but at least they discovered the problem and Content Analytics users can expect a patch at some point. Hate to bring up Microsoft at this venture, but whenever a big company has a problem I can’t help but think about how Microsoft never has a product launch without some issues. IBM is reliable and hopefully they will not go down the same path as Windows 8.
Whitney Grace, September 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
